REAL OPTIONS APPLICATION IN PRACTICE: A TEXT MINING BASED ANALYSIS

Sa？etak In the last 40 years real options theory has been, with its empirical findings and qualitative reasoning a constant driver of strategy research, whether if it dealt with market entry timing, choice of organizational forms, foreign direct investments, or the cooperation vs. competition trade-off. Yet, the understanding and application of real options still comes with challenges not even in the strategy field, but also in its original discipline of investments. With this paper I tried to build a strategic framework for the application of real options, with the aim of giving the theory a strategy based logic and trying to solve the chaos of the case-by-case type of application of research and practice. To confirm the stability of the framework, after showing the process of real option creation, valuation and management, I conducted a more than 1000 article based literature survey. This shows that the strategic direction is a must for practitioners and researchers also, and highlights future research areas like the portfolio based approach of real options, or a need for a general valuation model